Buckwheat Wins Affirmative Action Nobel Peace Prize!
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Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize
Friday, October 9, 2009
The Norwegian Nobel Committee says U.S. President Barack Obama has won
the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for "his extraordinary efforts to
strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, Colombian senator Piedad
Cordoba and Chinese dissident Hu Jia had been among the favorites to
win the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Norwegian national broadcaster NRK
reported Friday.
French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and Afghan woman's
rights activist Simi Samar also are possible candidates for the
prestigious prize, NRK said, about an hour before the Norwegian Nobel
committee was set to announce the prize at 11 a.m. (0900GMT).
As always, the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee has remained
tightlipped about its decision, which it made earlier this week, but
will unveil its choice Friday. A record 205 nominations were received
this year.
"We've had all the meetings we're going to have, and done what we
needed to do," the committee's nonvoting secretary Geir Lundestad told
The Associated Press Thursday.
British bookmaker Ladbrokes and its Irish counterpart, PaddyPower,
give the best odds to imprisoned Hu, Cordoba, Prince Ghazi bin
Muhammad of Jordan, and Samar.
Hu, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of the Chinese
government, was sentenced last year to a three-and-a-half-year prison
term for "inciting subversion of state power" ahead of the Beijing
Olympics. He also was a favorite for the prize last year, when the 10
million kronor ($1.4 million) award went to Finland's ex-president
Martti Ahtisaari for decades of work as a peace mediator.
Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Peace Research Institute,
Oslo, said he favored Cordoba, who leads Colombians for Peace, an
organization whose aim is to facilitate peace negotiations between the
government and the country's leftist FARC guerrillas.
Cordoba is a polarizing figure in Colombia owing to her close
relations with Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, and her
criticisms of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's government as an
illegitimate "mafia state" that came to power with the help of
right-wing death squads.
Despite that polemical status, she has been at the forefront of
efforts to peacefully end her country's half-century-old conflict,
which is rooted in deep social divisions. She was nominated by Adolfo
Perez Esquivel, an Argentine who won the peace prize in 1980 and is a
fierce critic of Uribe.
Guesses from the Peace Research Institute -- an annual ritual -- have
become the cornerstone of world Nobel Peace Prize speculation.
However, institute officials admit they have no inside information,
and they rarely predict the winner.
Harpviken also mentioned bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in
Jordan who advocates interfaith dialogue in the Middle East, a region
shot through with sectarian violence, and Samar. She currently leads
the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and serves as the
U.N. special envoy to Darfur.
He said he thought this year's award would go toward making "an impact
on evolving processes" _ such as armed conflict resolution _ with the
hope of encouraging their continuation.
In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should
go "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for
fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of
standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses."
Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which are awarded by Swedish
institutions, he said the peace prize should be given out by a
five-member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Sweden and
Norway were united under the same crown at the time of Nobel's death.
The committee has taken a wide interpretation of Nobel's guidelines,
expanding the prize beyond peace mediation to include efforts to
combat poverty, disease and climate change. Some experts believe the
committee will turn to human rights this year, because it hasn't
picked a human rights activist since tapping Iranian lawyer Shirin
Ebadi for the prize in 2003.
"Twenty years since Tiananmen Square? Maybe a Chinese?" said Dan
Smith, of the London-based International Alert peace group.
Emerging superpower China remains deeply sensitive about criticism of
its bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen
Square. And awarding dissidents would be a major poke-in-the-eye in
the year the communist regime, established 60 years ago, celebrates
its diamond jubilee.
The committee is famous for making grand symbolic gestures aimed at
influencing the world agenda, as in 1989 when, in the wake of the
Tiananmen massacre, the prize went to the Dalai Lama, the exiled
Tibetan spiritual leader.
Although most of the buzz this year surrounds Hu, another candidate
could be Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for
urging reforms of China's communist system. He now lives in the United
States.
Harpviken told journalists last week that he was skeptical of
suggestions that a dissident of any nationality might win the prize
this year. He noted that Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland,
who just ended a four-year term as president of Norway's parliament,
was elected secretary general of the Council of Europe on Sept. 29.
Harpviken said he believes Jagland's connection to both the Norwegian
government and a major pan-European organization will make the
committee "careful" about who it chooses, hoping to avoid a public
debate about its political independence. He Special: Get Sarah Palin�s
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Jagland might want to avoid complicating his five-year term at the
helm of the Council of Europe.
"It would be hard to think that it hasn't had an impact" on the
deliberation process, Harpviken said.
Jan Egeland, director of Oslo's Norwegian Institute of International
Affairs, said he nominated Denis Mukwege, a physician in war-torn
Congo who opened a clinic to help rape victims.
"He is working for the people in the biggest war," he said. "Sometimes
the committee has to address the biggest wars."